The Internet has made it easier to obtain the latest information and to make better informed decisions when purchasing products and services. The Internet also acts as a powerful tool for advertising and marketing as it hosts websites and other types of interactive systems, for example, weblogs (blogs), personalized weblogs (plogs), community sites, chat services, message services, and Usenet groups. These interactive systems provide a platform on which consumers, advertisers, and other reviewers can post commentary, views, and recommendations related to various types of products. The products may include, for example, physical products, journal articles, movie and music titles, downloadable software, services, financial products, and the like.
As is common now, to advertise a product, on-line advertisements (ads) are displayed along with search results on various search engines (for example, as sponsored results on Google or Yahoo or as display ads on web sites). The advertisee, which may be a company selling its product or an advertising agency hired by the company to sell its products, pays a web site owner/publisher, or a search engine, to advertise the product as a static or dynamic ad, banner ad, text ads like Google Adsense sponsored links, and the like. Typically, an Internet user performs a search, for example on MP3 players, in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo or visits a web site and sees the ads displayed adjacent to editorial content. Results of the search or display ads include sponsored ads such as an ad for the Apple Ipod. The Internet user can then click on the sponsored ad to navigate to the advertiser's website and obtain more information and/or buy the product.
Product reviews provided by consumers, such as bloggers, are useful to both the entity whose product is being reviewed, and also for the millions of prospective consumers who may be interested in purchasing the product. Thus, the Internet can serve as a powerful medium for word-of-mouth behavior from a wide variety of consumers.
Many techniques well known in the art have attempted to make use of online reviews and commentary. For example, in accordance with one technique known in the art for advertising, a method of assimilating customer feedback is disclosed. In this method, word-of-mouth comments from satisfied customers are determined through a networked community. However, this well known technique does not disclose how the word-of-mouth comments are used for generating advertisements linking back to product reviews. Also, it does not disclose how word-of-mouth comments can serve as sponsored links, including headlines, highlighting the word-of-mouth comments.
In accordance with another technique known in the art, a blog search engine is disclosed wherein clients pay entities hosting the blog search engine to syndicate links to bloggers talking about a particular product. However, the blog search does not help the client determine what bloggers are discussing in relation to their product. Moreover, the blog search engine only displays the results, and does not provide a publishing system where the clients can write headlines that link to the blogs.
Further, the existing interactive systems and sources for posting or publishing comments have an inherent limitation in utilizing the available information; the information is not available and organized at a single website or in a single database. To address this problem, a technique known in the art is used for identifying the speaker attributes and semantic attributes associated with the captured data and for analyzing the processed information based on the data. However, this technique does not publish the classified information at a single website. Moreover, the technique does not use the classified information as an advertising platform or publishing system. It also fails to disclose any sort of headline/favorable user commentary-based method of advertising.
Due to the distributed nature of the Internet, and the lack of availability of collective information, merchants and manufacturers typically, lack sufficient information about consumer experiences corresponding to items sold by the merchants or made by the manufacturers. Thus, merchants and manufacturers are deprived of information that would allow them to provide better service and/or products. Furthermore, because merchants are deprived of sufficient consumer opinions and feedback on previously purchased items, they are handicapped in their ability to generate an accurate consumer profile that would allow the merchants to recommend future items for purchase by the consumer.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a one-stop-shop for feedback and commentary on products. Also, there is a need for systems and methods that will assist advertisers and marketers to market their products effectively. Further, there is a need to collect feedback from a number of online sources to guide potential purchasers to make informed decisions by reading unbiased and honest opinions from real consumers from a single source.